Written by Michael Henry

Michael Henry is a Board Member of VoegelinView, Professor of Philosophy at St. John's University in New York, and was editor of The Library of Conservative Thought series at Transaction Publishers (1998-2016). His latest book is The Loss and Recovery of Truth: Selected Writings of Gerhart Niemeyer (St. Augustine's, 2013).

The apparent injustice of bad things happening to good people—as well as the reverse—has for many been a stumbling block for faith in God. To the Theodicy question that asks how evil and suffering can be reconciled with an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, a number of answers have been proposed—all…

Although it seems more appropriate to call this slender volume an essay rather than a book, it nonetheless contains a dense summary of what political religions are and how they have made so much progress in replacing Christianity in the modern world. Raeder, a…

One of Dostoevsky’s more profound and even prophetic philosophical questions is posed by Ivan, the intellectual, to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring monk, in The Brothers Karamazov: Would he find the torture of one child acceptable if it was somehow the necessary means…

Although Augustine wrote several books that are dialogues his Confessions, composed as a prayer, does not at first seem to be one of them. It appears rather to be a lengthy monologue addressed to God in which Augustine, in order to inspire in his readers a similar metanoia, reprises his internal peregrinatio that culminated, midway through the book, in the…

The Fool of New York City. Michael D. O’Brien. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 2016.

Those who have read some of Michael D. O’Brien’s novels might think they know what to expect in his most recent work: a devout Catholic struggling with numerous difficulties, or a lapsed or lukewarm Catholic who will eventually reawaken to fervent belief, or the war between faith…

Unlike the word “modern,” which in common usage usually connotes progress and improvement over the past, “modernity” is a more abstract, less commonly used word that is often pejorative, suggesting the negative cultural underside of “progress.” The “culture war” in which the Western world is currently engaged is a contest between those who regard the modern age of secularism, scientism,…

Michael D. O’Brien’s eleventh novel, Elijah in Jerusalem: A Novel, is also the third installment of what has become his Father Elijah trilogy. The first (although not first in the order of publication) was Sophia House: A Novel, which told the story of the Hasidic youth David Schäfer…